Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, December 22, 2014

Fracking is Fundamental

By Alan
Caruba

“It is a
sad day when a state chooses to listen to the fear, uncertainty, and doubts
spread by anti-fossil fuel agitators rather than making a decision for economic
strength that would benefit schools, communities, and many of its poorest
citizens—especially when the vilified technology, hydraulic fracturing, has
been used safely and successfully for more than 60 years and has brought
prosperity to other formerly struggling regions.”

Marita
Noon

Executive
Director, Citizens Alliance for Responsible Energy

Policy
Advisor, The Heartland Institute

Responding
to the announcement by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo that the state would ban
fracking, Ms. Noon joined others, bringing their expertise to bear on a topic
that remains a concern only because environmentalist enemies of energy in
America continue to lie about it every chance they get.

In his
book, “The Fracking Truth--America’s Energy Revolution: The Inside, Untold
Story”. Chris Faulkner wrote “Furthermore, it’s been commonplace for decades.
Worldwide, it’s estimated that more than 2.5 million wells have been fracked
and the U.S. accounted for about half of those. Today, about 35,000 wells are
fracked each year in all types of wells. And it’s impact on industry? It’s been
estimated that 80% of production from unconventional sources such as shales
would not be feasible without it.”

The
Governor’s decision has everything to do with wooing the support of
environmentalists in New York and nothing to do with the jobs and billions in
tax revenue that fracking would have represented.

New York’s
acting health commissioner, Howard Zucker, justified the decision saying that
“cumulative concerns” about fracking “give me reason to pause.” Are we truly
expected to believe that five years of study since the initial 2009 memorandum
about fracking any provided reason to ban it?If the use of fracking technology dates back to 1947 without a single
incident of pollution traced to it, what would it take to create “cumulative
concerns” except ignorance or prejudice against the facts?

Even the
Environmental Protection Agency has never found evidence of the chemicals used
in fracking entering the nation’s groundwater. Moreover, fracking fluid is
99.5% water and sand. The rest is a mixture of chemicals similar to household
products that could be found under the kitchen sink.

As Dr. Jay
Lehr, Science Director of The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank,
points out, “Today we only fracture wells that are drilled horizontally and
that requires 1,500 feet of vertical depth for the well” and thus “all such
wells are way belowlocal water
wells.”

How
idiotic, then, is it to seal off some twelve million acres of the Marcellus
Shale, an underground rock formation with natural gas reserves that have helped
create energy production booms in North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia,
Colorado, and Ohio?

A December
19 Wall Street Journal editorial noted that just across New York’s border with
neighboring Pennsylvania, “A 2011 Manhattan Institute study estimated that each
Marcellus Shale well in Pennsylvania generates $5 million in economic benefits
and $2 million in tax revenue.” Companies there have generated more than $2.1
billion in state and local taxes since the fracking boom began. As one observer
noted, “The ban ignores New York’s “6% unemployment rate, a depressed upstate
region, and the fourth highest electricity prices in the nation.”

I don’t
know how long it will take for the vast majority of the U.S. population to
conclude that everything the environmentalists and their propagandists in the
nation’s schools and media have to say about energy is as vast a hoax as the
now discredited “global warming”, since renamed “climate change.”

Energy is
the master resource, the lifeblood of ours and the world’s economy, the basis
for electricity, for the ability to travel vast distances, for machines that
enable vast harvests of crops by barely 2% of the U.S. population, to power all
manufacturing, and to heat or cool our living and workplaces.

Fracking
is yet another technological miracle and, of course, the environmentalists
oppose it.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.